Faro Furnished Hotel Addis Ababa

... coals, this lovely smell mixes with that of the roasted beans, creating a wonderfully smoky aroma that fills the room and prepares the drinker for his first sip. The coffee is then ground by hand and placed in an earthenware pot. The boiling water is poured over grounds and the coffee is served in little cups with plenty of sugar. The ritual is repeated three times, each round having a different name, and it is considered rude to leave before the third cup. It all takes about two hours ...

... to attend the meeting and give input as well. We discussed first and next steps for the NGO, how the relationship with the Rwandan Dental Association should work (most of the active members, and several officers were in the room), and other organizational issues on which we all needed to be agreed. <br><br>It was a pleasure to get to know several new people and to begin working together on such a worthy project: importing ...

... me and, aft** realizing she'd locked h**self out of h** room, had to sleep on a mattress in the office behind the front desk - I'm sure if I'd been 10 minutes lat**, Phil's room would have been h**s . . . So, as Lydia tried to get some sleep (she'd had two ov**night flights), I had breakfast with Phil and his new roommate, Henry, and tried to figure out what Lydia and I might do ov** the next couple of weeks. Turns out that Phil and Henry w**e both in Ethiopia for their ...

... plastic containers. The water trip was made twice daily. Washing was being done in a plastic bowl using some of the precious water. The hut was lit by candle in the evening. The children went to primary school and their exercise books were hanging on a piece of string inside the hut. The children did not have shoes on their feet but they did have huge smiles. Our guide Malcolm paid the family for showing us around their house.

Jasper wrote the following: "THIS BIT GOT LOST IN THE HILTON BUSINESS CENTRE". We'll add it later, but the pix are here. Continued: Adopting a Turtle nest. As you heard from another entry, we stayed at Watamu on Kenya's coast. While we were there my brother and I had both adopted a turtle nest and had bought 2 Watamu Turtle Watch T-shirts at ...

... an eight-story construction project has been christened the Barack Obama Building.  A fellow volunteer reported to me an incident in which her Addis taxi driver told a young street girl soliciting money, "Obama yistilin" - in Amharic, "May Obama bless you."  The driver remarked, "God and Jesus, number 1.  Obama, number 2!"             Ethiopia's affection for Obama is grounded in both the personal and the political.  Asked why they favor Obama, I have ...

... too, an unmistakable confidence building in our friend. We saw her growing assurance in who she was (and was not), what she was (and was not) passionate about, and what she wanted out of life. Ultimately, we recognized a new found courage to pursue those things, to break away from the path being laid out before her in order to chart a course of her own. We all gathered at her house on the weekend before her departure. It was the seven of us who had gone up into the ...

... zone neighbours start their day at 12 midnight! So they are 6 hours behind their neighbours. At first I thought all the clocks in Ethiopia were wrong but they keep track of their time zone neighbours in more official places eg airports, on this computer I am working on, etcetera.

... in the east of the country, and there a Belgian aid worker told him, "Some people spit on me at the market, for no other reason than that I am a 'faranji'." Faranji or some similar sounding word is used through much of the Muslim world, from Indonesia to Morocco, to describe someone of European descent. It comes from the corruption of the word Frank, who were people from France who went on crusades against the Muslims. Of course there were other types of Europeans in the crusades ...

... It wans't a pleasant park with a bunch of animals. We thought that couldn't be the place we wanted to go. We alreayd paid the admission fee anyway so we thought we would walk around a bit. Then we got out and saw the sign at the door(why didn't we see it before we got in?) saying Lion Park Zoo. We had to start loooking at a map and went a different way. It took a while to finally find the place. It's inside the Addis Ababa University. The place looks decent and the exhibitions ...